Digital Parenting Minute

Limit Web Access on a Mac

Do you know that you can limit what sites your child can visit on your Mac? Learn how to use the parental controls included with you Mac to setup some reasonable limits. If you haven’t setup child accounts already, you can follow our previous video to get that in place.

Transcript

Do you have a Mac in your house? Do you want to be able to control what websites your child goes to? Well today, we’re going to cover how you use the Child Accounts on a Mac, to control what websites they can access. Let’s go.

To control access to what websites your kid can go to on your Mac, first log into your Parent Account. Then go in under the Apple menu and go to System Preferences. Once this launches, click on Parental Controls. Now we set up a child account in the last episode, you can go back and take a look at that.

We’re going to click the lock down here at the bottom, if it is locked and that’s going to allow us to actually edit this. Click on the Child Account, and then go to the Web tab, now in this tab Apple gives you three options.

First is you can allow unrestricted access to websites. That means your kids can go anywhere.

The next option is, try to limit access to adult websites. Now this gives you a little bit of customization but this means you’re going to have to trust in the controls, they have put in place.

Now the best option, especially if you have younger kids is the third option, which is, allow access to only these websites. So Apple has pre-populated a list that includes, PBS Kids, and Scholastic and Smithsonian and some others. If you want to add a new website to this list, you just click the plus button, and you actually go in and add a bookmark. So we could add in, if you had a younger kid and you’re looking at using a site like Starfall, you can just add that in and if you want to remove a specific one, you can actually just click on it and then hit the minus sign.